Copy image from clipboard to file

Question

Is it possible to take an image from the clipboard and output it to a file (using X)?

I can do this with text easily:

$ xclip -selection c -o > file.text

But when I try the above with an image nothing is written.

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The reason I want to do this is I don't have an image editor installed, and it got me thinking whether I could do this without installing one.

Solution 1

You can actually do this with xclip using -t option.

1. See what targets are available:

$ xclip -selection clipboard -t TARGETS -o
TARGETS
image/png
text/html

2. Note the image/png target; go ahead and get it:

$ xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o > /tmp/clipboard.png

Refer to the ICCCM Section 2.6.2 for further reading.

Note: xclip SVN revision 81 (from April 2010) or patches later required.

Solution 2

xclip doesn't work with images on my computer (svn84-4) :

$ xclip -selection clipboard -t image/png -o
Error: target image/png not available

But there is another program which take screenshot and paste it into a file, very simply : scrot :

scrot /tmp/myImage.png

Comments

[programmingmusic]

I am using 0.12, the one that is offered by pacman so I shall have to get the upstream version. Thanks!

[Stígandr]

Error: target image/png not available this be old. Debian stretch

[derobert]

@Stígandr I confirmed this still works on my machine running Debian testing (stretch). Maybe you copied a JPEG or some other type of image? Probably best to ask a new question rather than debug it in comments.

[phil294]

On my machine, i needed to specify -selection primary instead.

[derobert]

@phil294 that's the other X clipboard, the two used ones are primary and clipboard (there are others, but nothing uses them). Primary is normally select and middle-click, clipboard is normally copy/paste

[MD. Mohiuddin Ahmed]

It appears 'scrot' takes screenshot of my GNOME Terminal instead of taking it from clipboard. 'man' pages appears to be indicating no flag for this

[pataka]

Can I test the results of target? i.e is my image type available

[derobert]

@zzapper it spits out the types available, so you can test it by piping to grep for example.